There are crises piling on crises, and analysts warning that we are in a 1914 moment seem to be speaking a truth we don’t want to hear but we should.
Authored by Jeffrey Tucker: This is not about whether there is such a thing as a literal social contract. The phrase has always been a metaphor, and an imprecise one since it was first invoked by Enlightenment-era thinkers trying to sort through a rationale for collective practice of some sort.
It’s easy enough to regard the social contact not as explicit but implied, evolved and organic to the public mind. At the most intuitive level, we can think of it as a widely shared understanding of mutual obligation, a tie that binds, and also the exchange relationship between society and state.
The bare minimum idea of a social contract is to seek out widespread security and peace for as many members as possible.
No matter how narrow or broad you understand that phrase, it includes most fundamentally the shared expectations of what government should and shouldn’t do.
Above all else, it means protecting the public from violent attack and hence defending the rights and liberties of the people against imposition on person, public or private.
The reality today is that the social contract is broken in nations all over the world. This concerns the widespread failure of social welfare, health systems and sound money. It includes the medical conscription called vaccine mandates.
It impacts on mass migration as well as crime, and many other issues as well. Systems are failing the world over with ill health, low growth, inflation, rising debt and widespread insecurity and distrust.
